It is conventionally recognized that the words we combine to form text can have an emotional impact on the reader. Such impact arises from two distinct sources of effect related to the text. First, there is contextual emotional impact. Contextual emotional impact is the emotional impact that text can be expected to have on a reader due to the meaning of the words as a whole, as opposed to the literal meaning of individual words or phrases. For example, the words “I kissed your spouse on the lips” may cause hostility in a reader. This is not because any of the words in this text (“I,” “kissed,” “spouse,” etc.), viewed in isolation, is an angry word. Rather, the reader will likely perceive that inappropriate behavior has taken place, and become angry because of this.
Most people have a considerable appreciation of contextual emotional impact, and evidence this understanding by using techniques of communication that rely on manipulation of contextual emotional impact. For example, flattery, fighting words and eulogies are types of communication where the meaning of the words used are intended to invoke various kinds of specific emotional responses in the listener (or reader) because of what the words mean in context. In this way, contextual meaning would be what one intends to literally communicate to another person through the combination of words used. While obviously of great importance in communication, contextual impact is not the main subject of this document.
A subtler type of emotional impact is called lexical emotional impact. This is an emotional impact that can be expected in the reader due to the underlying associative meaning of specific words and phrases. For example, consider the following statement: “Murder is illegal and immoral.” This statement is uncontroversial, and therefore should have little contextual emotional impact. Nevertheless, because “murder” and “immoral” are words that have a strong valence within the affective (that is, emotional) category of hostility, this statement might have a significant impact from a lexical perspective. Specifically the reader can be expected to become (perhaps unconsciously) subjectively evoked upon reading the words “murder” and “immoral” by the compound incidences of high-valence hostile words, despite the relatively innocuous context. “Subjectively evoked” here means evoked in a manner characteristic of the reader's unique response to the elicited category—in this case, hostility (which typically would evoke hostility and/or a sense of threat). Hence, from a lexical perspective, the parts are greater than the whole.
Lexical emotional impact has been a subject of serious psychological inquiry, and analysis based on lexical emotional impact is performed and applied, for instance, by authors of advertising text and authors of political speeches. According to this background art, the lexical emotional impact is determined for a large set of vocabulary words. This may be determined by informal observation of emotional impact of the words, or more preferably by scientific, psychological study. An author then memorizes the lexical emotional impact of the words, and chooses words of the text to have the desired lexical emotional impact. The author may rewrite and revise the text (which is especially easy to do with a computerized word processor) in order to optimize the desired lexical impact based on the vocabulary list.
The desired lexical emotional impact varies depending on the objectives and intended audience of the text. For example, the text may attempt to evoke a particular emotional reaction, such as happiness. Alternatively, it may be desired to write a text devoid of lexical emotional impact, or filled with lots of conflicting lexical emotional impacts. As awareness of lexical emotional impact increases, it is possible that more sophisticated objectives, with respect to lexical emotional impact, will be developed.